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POLITICO LIVE: Remembering Richard Ben Cramer

A Rochester, N.Y., native who worked for, among others, Esquire and Rolling Stone, Cramer won a Pulitzer for reporting on the Middle East for the Inquirer in 1979.

“He was the epitome of Gene Roberts’ view of what an Inquirer reporter should do: Zig when everybody else zags,” said Leslie Hoffecker, who was one of Cramer's editors in Philadelphia. Hoffecker, now an editor at Bloomberg’s Washington bureau, particularly remembered “his evocative walk across the two-mile no-man’s-land between Palestinian and Israeli forces in 1978.”

The presidential campaign that took place in 1988 was the grist for “What It Takes: The Way to the White House.”

Cramer’s 1,049-page tome, which was critically panned soon after its 1992 release, but ultimately came to be seen as a definitive work for a generation of political reporters. The book was later ranked No. 58 in a New York University list of the century’s top 100 works of journalism.